Читать книгу England, Their England - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 6

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Donald Cameron had no qualifications for any profession except the ability to drive a moderately crooked furrow and to direct the fire of a six-gun battery of eighteen-pounder guns, and so he resolved to try his fortune as a journalist. There seemed to be no other profession which required neither ability nor training. He was fortified in this resolution by the fact that his letters of introduction from the lecturer and the librarian were all addressed to literary men, the former having several times corresponded with editors about rejected articles and the latter being a member of the Librarians' Association, a body that occasionally came into touch with those who write books as well as those who read them.

But the double set of introductions led to a small difficulty at 7.30 on the morning of the day when the Aberdeen express drew up at King's Cross station and decanted a tousled and sleepy Donald from his third-class corner. For the lecturer in Italian had warmly recommended Chelsea as the only possible region in which a literary man could live, whereas the librarian had repeatedly affirmed that no one who was anyone lived further away from the British Museum than an average athlete at the Aboyne Games could throw a stone. Donald's own experience of London consisted of an intimate knowledge of Reggiori's restaurant opposite King's Cross station, the few hundred yards between the Palace Theatre and the Piccadilly Hotel, and the leave-train platforms of Victoria Station; and in consequence Chelsea and Bloomsbury were all one to him, both as residential districts and as Movements in Art. To him Chelsea was "the Quartier Latin of London," and as for Bloomsbury, he had heard of Virginia Woolf but not of Miss Sackville-West.

It was the spin of a coin upon the arrival platform of the London and North-Eastern Railway's terminus that directed his taxi in the direction of Chelsea, and by tea-time of the same afternoon Donald was installed in a bed-sitting-room on the second floor of a Carolean house in Royal Avenue, just off the King's Road. The landlady was an elderly dame with a roving eye, who looked as if she had had her fling in her day, forty years before. Her daughter also had a roving eye, and looked as if she was ready to have a fling at any moment. Her name was Gwladys and she terrified Donald. She was tall and ladylike and full of little ways. Every morning Donald met her at the door of the bathroom, for his descent, at whatever hour he made it, invariably seemed to coincide with her entrance or exit—screaming modestly in a flurry of pink dressing-gown and lace-topped nightgown. And often when he was going upstairs to bed he would meet Gwladys on the stairs, and she would tell him all about her fiancé, a naval commander who was killed at Jutland and who was very fond of port wine. Donald shyly sympathized with her loss and put forward the opinion, nervously, that port wine was infinitely preferable to Jutland. Gwladys' view was that in any case the present was better than the past.

Donald's first letter of introduction was to the literary editor of a well-known weekly paper which had leanings towards a mild form of intellectual Socialism. No one would have been more alarmed and bewildered than the literary editor if a sudden swing of the political pendulum had brought about the nationalization of the Means of Production, Distribution, and Exchange which his newspaper so elegantly advocated. For the literary editor was an Irishman who, if he despised money and made very lethargic and intermittent efforts to acquire any, nevertheless was heartily fond of many of the things which money can buy. He was a brilliant critic, a vile editor, and a superb luncher-out. He went to a lunch-party every day of the week, was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, and was always welcome. For his conversation was not only easy, witty, learned, universal; it was enchanting as well. The man radiated charm. Charm was his capital and conversation his income, and both were inexhaustible. His name was Charles Ossory.

Donald presented his letter of introduction to Mr. Ossory's secretary, a small, dark lady of incredible sharpness and efficiency, one afternoon at 3 P.M., and the sharp little lady examined him briefly and explained that Mr. Ossory was out. She added that she had full authority to make appointments for Mr. Ossory, and that if Mr. Cameron cared to come along at 4.30 on the following afternoon, Tuesday, it was possible that Mr. Ossory might by that time have come back from his lunch.

"From his tea," corrected Donald mildly.

"From his lunch," snapped the sharp little lady, and she turned to a gigantic card-index in a way that suggested only too plainly that the conversation was over. On the Tuesday afternoon Donald presented himself nervously at the dragonlet's den and waited until, an hour later, the butler of a Dowager Marchioness telephoned to say that Mr. Ossory was not going to return to his Bureau that day.

On the Wednesday afternoon it was the lady secretary of a Cabinet Minister's wife who did the telephoning, only she called it "his department," and on the Thursday it was a Countess whose quarterings were unimpeachable but whose income did not run to a telephonic intermediary, and so had to do it herself. On Friday Mr. Ossory went away for his usual week-end, returning on Tuesday just in time not to go to the office, and it was only by chance that a hasty visit on the Wednesday afternoon, to correct the proofs of a wise and witty article about Molière, happened to coincide with one of Donald's vigils. Charles Ossory came into the office in a great hurry and stayed, talking to Donald enchantingly, for an hour and a half, his eyes twinkling away and his lovely sentences tumbling out in his lovely soft voice. He was no longer in a hurry. His engagements were forgotten. In vain did the dragonlet dart in and out of the office, ordering him either to correct his proof or to go to Whitehall Gardens to have tea with Mr. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Ossory, with enchanting blandness, refused to do either, and Donald thought it was the most flattering thing that had ever come his way. But that was all from Mr. Ossory that did come his way, except the task of compiling a list of autumn novels for a book-supplement of the mildly Socialistic weekly, for which he received three guineas; that, and a piece of information. For Mr. Ossory told him, in his soft lovely voice, that the literary profession was grotesquely overcrowded, and that it was only possible for men of exceptional talent to enter it, and then only if they had been already in the profession for years. Unless they had been in it for years, he pointed out, how could they show their exceptional talent?

It says a great deal for Mr. Ossory's charm that he made this sound quite reasonable, and it was not until Donald had returned home to Royal Avenue and pondered deeply over the position that he decided to give up Mr. Ossory as a potential Maecenas and to try his second letter of introduction.

This was from the librarian of King's College Library, and was addressed to Mr. Alexander Ogilvy, LL.D. of St. Andrews University, and editor of the Illustrated Planet. Mr. Ogilvy's business habits were different, apparently, from those of Mr. Ossory, for he made an appointment with Donald for 8.30 A.M., and at 8.31 A.M. received his visitor. 8.31 A.M. is a difficult time of the day for any but the hardiest of spirits, and Donald's shyness was even more overpowering at that hour than later on. He had breakfasted much too early, so as not to be late for the appointment, and he had spent a cold half-hour in a dark, stone-flagged waiting-room at the office of the Illustrated Planet between 8 o'clock and half-past, his courage sinking with his temperature, and a hungry feeling competing with a nervous feeling for supremacy in the neighbourhood of his lower waistcoat buttons. The sudden jarring of the electric bell at one minute past the hour of the appointment came like the whistles of the platoon commander at zero hour, and his eyes were all blurred when he shambled through a glass door into the presence of the great Mr. Ogilvy.

When the haze had cleared away, he saw that an extraordinary person was staring at him from a distance of about three feet. Mr. Ogilvy was a small man—a very small man—and he had an enormous head. Seated at his office table, he looked like an eccentric giant who preferred to sit upon the floor so that only his head appeared above the polished surface, for there was little of Mr. Ogilvy visible except this mammoth cranium. But when he jumped up smartly and held out his hand, his full length of about five feet—four feet of which were body and legs, and one of which was head, became apparent. Donald sat down opposite him and an embarrassing silence followed. Donald glanced round the room, looked at the floor, his finger-nails, the shiny top of the table, and finally shot a furtive glance at Mr. Ogilvy. This glance gave him a profound surprise, for he had imagined at first that the hugeness of the little man's head was his most important feature. Now he saw that this was wrong, for the giant skull, dwarfing as it did the four-foot body, was itself dwarfed by a chin that was shaped like a Spanish spade-beard, like the front end of a torpedo boat photographed in a dry dock, like an instrument for bashing in the gates of mediaeval cities. It was a regular Cyrano among chins, and the little man was evidently as conscious of his panache as the Gascon was of his. For as he looked at Donald during the embarrassing silence, he thrust it forward in a rather menacing way, just like the pictures of the mythical Captain Kettle. Donald, by now a-twitter with nervous palpitations, wondered if the little man's first words would be a rasping command to Marshal Soult to attack the Russian centre, or a single word which would unleash the Old Guard up the slopes of St. Jean. As it was, Mr Ogilvy's first words were unintelligible.

"Erracht, Mamore, or Fassifern?" he barked.

Donald started, and swept a large glass inkbottle to the floor, where it shivered into ten thousand splinters and flung its blue-black contents into every corner of the room. Mumbling apologies and perspiring freely, for the cold feeling had been suddenly superseded by intense heat, Donald fell on his knees, upsetting his chair with a clatter, and started to mop up the flood with his handkerchief. Somewhere in the distance, about two miles away, the electric bell rang again, and an office-boy, miraculously covering the two miles in a second or so, appeared with mop and brush and pan, and Donald, purple in the face and blue-black on the hands, reseated himself on his righted chair.

Mr. Ogilvy waved away his apologies, and Donald perceived that there was a kindly look in his eyes and a gentle tone in his voice which did not harmonize with the terrific aspect of his chin.

"I was asking you," said Mr. Ogilvy, in a very broad Lanarkshire accent, "to what branch of the Clan Cameron you belonged?"

"I—I don't know exactly," stammered Donald. Mr. Ogilvy's kindly expression vanished and the Austerlitz manner reasserted itself.

"It's a poor Highlander who doesn't know his own chieftain," he observed coldly.

The blood ran to Donald's forehead at this, and he astonished himself by replying sharply, "We have no chieftain. Lochiel's our chief."

Mr. Ogilvy lay back in his chair and smiled a friendly smile; his huge head nodding up and down slowly, as if it was afraid of overstraining the neck by which it was precariously supported.

"All right, Mr. Cameron—all right, all right. I'm not so gyte as to ask questions that need not be answered. Do you know what 'gyte' means?"

"N-no."

"Where are you from, Mr. Cameron?"

"Balspindie, in Buchan."

Mr. Ogilvy pulled out a vast scrap-album from a shelf of vast scrap-albums and examined it attentively. Then he said:

"Was Ewan Cameron your father?"

"Yes."

"Ah! Then your mother was a Gordon from the family of William Gordon of Kinaldie? And William Gordon married an Allardyce who was the second cousin of the first wife of one of the Macleods of Assint? Let me see. Your father's father married a Kennedy from the region of Drumnadrochit, and she was half-sister to one of the Laggan Grants, the one who was drowned, you remember, in the great storm on Loch Lochy. Dear me! that's very interesting. And his father—your great-grandfather, Mr. Cameron, was believed to have been born during or just after the rebellion——"

"The what!" exclaimed Donald, starting up.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Cameron. I profoundly beg your pardon. I should have said the Forty-Five. And that's all that is known about your family, except that your great-aunt Mary, who married a Fraser from Strathcarron, was so proud of her beautiful voice that she used to go to Mass late, in order that the congregation might notice the difference between the singing before and after her arrival."

Mr. Ogilvy closed the big album with a bang, just saving his chin from being caught by the clashing covers like the Argo escaping the Symplegades, and carefully replaced it on its shelf. Then he turned back to Donald and said:

"Well, Mr. Cameron, and my good friend Mr. Greig of the College Library tells me that you want to enter upon a literary career."

Donald squirmed on his seat. The phrase "a literary career" seemed to make him out to be a pretentious prig, especially when it was endowed by the Lanarkshire accent with more r's than appeared phonetically possible. He had come south to try to support himself by "writing," a much simpler and homelier ambition than the carving of literary careers. Mr. Ogilvy went on.

"Mr. Greig says that he is sure you have all the makings of a literary man."

Donald squirmed again. Mr. Greig was a high-falutin ass. But Mr. Ogilvy's next words brought things to earth again.

"Well, maybe you have and maybe you haven't," he went on drily. "But there are two ways of finding out. Either go home and write something good—if it's good it will be published. There's a notion that publishers neglect good writers. They don't. They know their job. Either do that, or start in as a journalist."

"That was my idea," murmured Donald.

"Very good. Then you must try and get a job on a paper."

"I thought of free-lancing," said Donald, his voice sinking almost to a mumble. Again there was something priggish about the word "free-lancing," an affectation of romantic, individualist dash, like a captain of Free Companies or a cavalry leader.

"Very good," said Mr. Ogilvy decisively. "Free-lance and starve. Get a job and live. That's the rule in Fleet Street. Don't go and be silly. Now, I've been asked to find a man—an apprentice—for a paper, and if you like you can have the job. It'll be a good start for you."

Donald opened his eyes. To stumble upon a journalistic job within the first few weeks of coming to London was an amazing bit of luck. Free-lancing could wait. He leant forward eagerly and murmured some words of gratitude.

"It's a small job," said Mr. Ogilvy, "but it's a beginning, and in a few years, say three or four, you'll be qualified for a rise in the world. It's the usual thing—apprentice-reporter. That's how we all started. Would you like it?"

"I would love it," replied Donald fervently.

"Good. It's on the Glossop Evening Mail——"

"On the what?" said Donald, his jaw dropping.

"The Glossop Evening Mail. Glossop. Town in Derbyshire."

"But—but—I thought you meant a job in London," faltered Donald.

"Young man," replied Mr. Ogilvy, "London is half-way up the ladder. You must start on the lowest rung. Your niche is Glossop."

Except for this mixing of metaphors, Donald remembered nothing more until he found himself on the stairs of the Carolean house in Royal Avenue, watching a swirl of pink ribbons and silks retreating swiftly—yet not too swiftly—into the modest shades of Gwladys' bedroom.